When the boss reveals he is quite happy to muck in and order the portaloos for a building site it suggests an all for one attitude.

Rick Eggleston smiles as he admits he has had to perform a task like that in the past and then go into negotiations on deals worth millions of pounds.

By his own admission the move into Scotland's burgeoning renewable energy industry came at the right time.

After more than a quarter of a century in the defence and aerospace sector he decided the time was right for a change.

Fortunately he was given the opportunity to join REpower UK as projects director in September 2006.

Since 2009 he has been sole managing director at the wind turbine manufacturer.

During that period the business has expanded rapidly. It now employs more than 80 people in Edinburgh and has secured around 25 per cent of the UK onshore wind market.

Last year it reached the milestone of having installed 500 megawatts (MW) across Britain which is equivalent to enough power for 300,000 homes.

The 52-year-old jokes he feels like an old timer compared to the fresh faced thirty-somethings he works with but acknowledges he has been given a new lease of life by working in a fledgeling and fast moving sector.

He said: "Having been part of the electronics industry in Scotland and thinking how big it was to what it has shrunk to it has been really great to be part of something which is expanding.

"With this being a young industry it does pull in a lot of young people and I feel a little long in the tooth but I am having a good time.

"A big part of that is that it is something new. After 26 years in one industry going to do something totally different albeit with transferable skills was refreshing."

Sitting in his central Edinburgh office Eggleston admits in the beginning he had a lot to learn about renewable energy.

He said: "When I came in I knew nothing about the industry. I had never seen a wind turbine close up so it was quite a steep learning curve.

"The technology is not particularly complicated so that can be learnt quite quickly and the business skills are similar whatever the industry.

"But the particular peculiarities with regard to electricity, regulation of the market and how wind farm funding works and things like that are perhaps the most difficult bits to get your head around."

While Eggleston believes the current Scottish political regime has done a decent job of helping the industry the picture is slightly different at a UK level.

Areas he is concerned about include grid development, electricity market reform and the planning process.

He said: "It appears to me the grid is being developed on an almost ad hoc basis.

"I'm sure there is a masterplan but getting visibility of that is difficult.

"Support through the planning process can also be very tortuous particularly south of the border. "One of the things any business leader wants is stability in the marketplace. We have the electricity market reform going through and that has injected a lot of uncertainty into the market.

"I think it will slow down the recovery as people don't yet know what it will mean for them. The smaller developers in particular are waiting to find out what all the changes will mean."

Currently REpower does a range of products from single turbines up to large wind farms with dozens of turbines.

Although Eggleston is adamant the company will always support small projects be believes the trend is moving towards developments of a bigger scale.

He said: "There's still quite a long way to go in terms of onshore wind.

"The plans are for upwards of 12 gigawatts (GW) and we are currently sitting at a third of that.

"The customer base is one of the things which makes the industry quite interesting.

"We do single turbines for farmers or perhaps someone who has a bit of land.

"It is very common for industrial companies who use a lot of power and have land adjacent to a factory will buy a turbine to reduce their carbon footprint.

"At the other end of the scale are the large utilities. We are about to install our largest onshore wind farm 35 turbines - up at Gordonbush in the north of Scotland for Scottish and Southern Energy."

Major growth is also on the horizon when offshore wind farms start to pop up on the Scottish coast line over the next few years.

REpower hopes to grab at least a 30 per cent share of that market.

This year it will install its first UK offshore wind farm with the site at Ormonde in the Irish sea having 30 turbines capable of generating 35GW.

"To win that kind of business is about building long term relationships with those customers rather than bidding for individual contracts.

"Some of the offshore wind farms will be worth more than a billion Euro in terms of turbine content.

"So that is about working with the developer several years in advance and helping them with planning, technical design and building up relationships."

Eggleston believes Scotland may have missed the boat in some elements of wind energy particularly in supply chain and manufacturing.

He said: "There has been a lot of talk about bringing turbine manufacture to Scotland but doing that would not bring a lot of jobs here.

"Our turbine factories in Germany account for only two per cent of the value of the turbine. A lot of that value is in the supply chain.

"So it would only really be worth relocating that to Scotland if we can bring a significant part of the supply chain with us.

"There are well established specialist companies in Germany or Denmark which are already supplying a global market.

"Incentivising them to come and build gear boxes in Scotland is quite a difficult thing to do."

However he does believe there will hundreds of jobs created particularly when the Crown Estate's round three projects for offshore wind development start to filter through.

He said: "For offshore wind we have a lot of really good skills which we can export worldwide.

"That starts with the planning of offshore installations, the manufacture, installing underwater cables then the operation and maintenance in what are extremely hostile conditions in the North Sea. "Scotland leads the world in that sort of area.

"The number of people involved in building and maintaining an offshore wind farm is significant.

"Ormonde in Ireland is only 30 turbines but the operations and maintenance team is about 25 people.

"Scale that up to round three and the Scottish projects, where we have possibly 200 turbines in a wind farm, and there will be significant employment opportunities for people."

With thousands of potential jobs there are ongoing debates in the industry about getting the right mix of skills to fill the positions.

Eggleston thinks staff in the oil and gas sector could have a part to play but is an advocate of the renewables sector making its own provisions to train the next generation of employees.

REpower is one of the companies involved in the first wind power turbine technician apprenticeships and is seeing a growing interest in that scheme.

He said: "The first class are going through the apprenticeship at the moment. "Already for future years a lot more are interested in putting candidates forward and a lot more colleges are taking it up.

"It has been taken up by City and Guilds so is becoming a proper qualification.

"We have employed quite a lot of ex-oil and gas people for maintaining offshore turbines.

"There has to be an onus on businesses like ourselves to go through that pain of bringing people from outside and re-skilling them.

"If I look across our workforce perhaps only five per cent have past wind experience and the rest have come from different backgrounds.

"It makes more sense to me to get someone in the door and train them rather than wait six months to get someone more qualified.

"With the growth we are going to see if we all just rely on poaching from our competitors we are not going to get very far."

Career cv

Rick Eggleston grew up in Hexham, Northumberland and studied physics at university.

He moved north to work as a design engineer at Ferranti in Edinburgh.

Over the next 26 years he rose up through the ranks as Ferranti was swallowed by Marconi which was then taken over by BAE Systems.

During his time there he helped design laser guidance systems for smart weapons which were used in the Falklands and the first Iraq war.

By 2006 he was the business director running BAE's facility in Edinburgh when it was decided to move the unit to Kent.

Although Eggleston was given the chance to relocate he decided it was time to "go and do something different".

At that time REpower UK had around 20 staff and was looking for somebody with major projects experience to grow the business and make it more profitable.

Eggleston joined as project director in 2006 before being appointed joint managing director with Henning von Barsewisch in 2008.

Von Barsewisch had plans to move back to his native Germany and after a handover period Eggleston was appointed as sole managing director of the UK business in August 2009.

REpower UK now employs more than 100 people across Britain with the majority of those in Edinburgh.

Outside of work Eggleston is a keen skier and hillwalker who lives in the Scottish Borders with his wife and teenage son.